WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- The White Sox of recent vintage, likely en route to their third straight 100-loss season, are a tricky team to use as a gauge of major league standards.
Most players in camp last year were too grateful to have a major league jersey at all to spend much time grousing about how small their last name was printed. Similarly, being shipped out to a Triple-A park for a weekend in West Sacramento is too in line with what the average Sox player was experiencing last year, or even last week, to set off too many alarm bells.
"It's definitely a little different," said Sean Burke. "The volume of the stadium was similar to some other big league parks. But in terms of dimensions and stuff like that, it played pretty similar."
"It's fine, it's nothing crazy, but definitely looking forward to getting back to a big league park," said Jonathan Cannon.
Sutter Health Park, with its clubhouses lying beyond its outfield walls rather than fan seating, and where a suite had to be repurposed to account for the paltry media coverage that a Sox-A's weekend series draws, is clearly no big league park. It cannot pretend to be one, and attendance figures in the low five digits don't lend any sort of extra atmosphere to the uniquely intimate setting. The gap between it and the standard expectations MLB prestige conjures are a constant reminder of the absurd gambit that principal owner John Fisher undertook to wrest the storied A's franchise out of its long-term home in Oakland, and the smattering of Rickey Henderson tributes placed around the premises cannot disguise that.
Really, the biggest element working in the favor of this project is the intentional neglect of the Oakland Coliseum for the last few years.
"They did a good job with the locker room and the clubhouse," Will Venable said. "To be honest, it feels like an upgrade over Oakland in that regard."
Everything done to prepare Sutter Health Park for its new major league tenant -- new video and workout rooms, new chairs, televisions and lockers installed into clubhouses that are comfortably larger than the visitor's locker room at Fenway Park, or anything at Wrigley Field pre-renovation -- registers as the biggest facility upgrade A's players and baseball operations staffers have seen in years.
"We're embracing it. We're going to make it home," said A's slugger Brent Rooker. "We know we're here for three years. We're going to make the very best of it. We're going to try to use anything [from the park] to our advantage the best we possibly can."
"I think the whole setup is much better than expected," said Davis Martin.
If your view of massive, billion-dollar corporations is that they should be capable of enforcing a seamless set of standards, and anything else is "organizational malpractice," then it's easy to find warts in the A's operation, even if I personally didn't mind the gaps in security theater.
If you instead live on Earth, where the bloated size business entities reach and the general impunity with which they operate almost guarantees inconsistencies in public messaging and enforcement, then Sutter Health feels more par for the course. The fresh coat of paint slapped on top doesn't run that deep, but it's playable.
It's a relic of a healthier version of American society that a for-profit company would even think to provide food and a workplace for third-party journalists to come in and critique their operations, but the A's recent run of press has kept them more motivated than most of their MLB counterparts to keep up appearances. Not every MLB team is proactively hunting down their best hitter and making sure he's available to talk to a reporter from a White Sox blog about working out with Colson Montgomery for a couple offseasons, is what I'm saying.
In 2025, every MLB clubhouse has a few sets of t-shirts with a defiant team mantra or two printed on it. The A's have a shirt that reads "Nobody Cares" with a poker chip next to it; a reference to manager Mark Kotsay's season-opening message to not let their humble accommodations serve as an excuse. Being a pro athlete in the social media age is isolating enough that every roster is halfway to a foxhole mentality before anyone offers an extra nudge, and A's players have received multiple hard shoves.
While players may grow accustomed to the compromises Sutter Health Park makes with regards to clubhouses and capacity, the playing conditions seem to be the most dubious part about this arrangement.
Most noticeably, it's going to play small.
"In BP, the ball was flying," said Andrew Vaughn. "Lower skyline, with the backdrop being not so tall could cause some twilight issues, but I didn't see any [Friday] night."
"Coming in, we were expecting the ball to fly everywhere," Martin said. "Even the first day we were here during BP, the ball was flying. A lot of these guys came up through Charlotte so we know how to pitch in a hitter’s park. It’s just a factor you can’t really control."
Rooker was quick to point out that the Athletics' cache of power hitters at the top of their order lends them the expectation that they can slug anywhere, though their offense looks built for their new surroundings as much as their pitching staff very much does not. This weekend series wasn't defined by sketchy home runs, but a month of watching how Rate Field played in April made it notable that both Luis Robert Jr. and Jacob Wilson saw sub-100-mph exit velocity pulled contact turn into no-doubt homers at Sutter Health. Joshua Palacios hit a ball 100.7 mph on Sunday, and it went for the first opposite-field home run of his career. Only Camden Yards in Baltimore has seen a higher slugging percentage through the first month of the season.
But the largest issue is not playing big league baseball in a Pacific Coast League launching pad, but playing it in an occupied PCL launching pad. The Sacramento River Cats logos peeking through aren't oversights -- Sutter Health Park is the home field for two full-season baseball teams this summer, with the other one being the Triple-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants. White Sox players' main task for location scouting this weekend was assessing grass they expected to be more worn and uneven than typical due to simple overuse.
"It's a little different than most, kind of a high-traffic field with a Triple-A team here and a major league team playing here," said Brooks Baldwin. "But the dirt plays really good. It gets a little soft at times. The grass is a little bouncier than most and a little thicker than most, not so much height-wise but tighter than most. The balls bounces really high off of it, but other than that it plays pretty normal."
"I think that the grass can be a little bumpy and there's some consideration to the surface on the infield," Venable said. "Obviously, there's been a lot of traffic on this field. But it looks good."
Both A's and the River Cats grounds crews could be seen working a field that's not going to be afforded many days off all summer, and the spots that looked uneven in the outfield are only negligible if a season's worth of traffic doesn't have things looking worse a few hotter months than now. Making an undersized facility stretch to fit the demands of a major league team, but also just lobbing that task on top of its regular responsibilities, feels like burning the candle at both ends.
"That thing is going to get beat up," said Vaughn.
The A's host the Yankees next month, which will probably bring plenty of incredulous photos of the auxiliary media tent outside the stadium that went unused this weekend. The Red Sox and Astros visit in September, when a calf strain suffered on a lumpy spot of outfield could swing a playoff race. An early season series against the White Sox is not suited to bring any of these issues to the fore.
The visiting team has their own problems to worry about, like going 1-5 against an A's team whose surroundings suggest they're not a higher class of franchise. In the case of Jordan Leasure, you could literally watch him mulling it over, since the clubhouse placement meant he had to march back across the length of the field after yielding a 10th-inning walk-off homer to cap the series on Sunday.
"I think that's why I'm even more frustrated with this one, because our hitters are going up there putting together better at-bats," Leasure said. "We're really grinding, putting together some really good innings and obviously Davis had a great one today. Cannon had a great one yesterday. Watching that one slip away hurts a little bit more. Looking toward next week, I think we're in a pretty good spot to keep playing well."
